R script line numbers at error?

Question

I found this post from a year ago, and I'm using R version 2.11.1 (2010-05-31), but still getting error messages without line numbers.

Any solution?

I get error messages with line numbers. How are you loading your scripts? — Shane, Sep 07 '10 at 20:08

Joris Meys · Accepted Answer · 2010-09-07T17:10:14.897

6

The answers given there are still valid. Returning line numbers from a script ain't that straight-forward, but R can give you a lot more information on where the error can be found.

You could use the error options to save the info in a file, for example :

options(error = quote({
  sink(file="error.txt");
  dump.frames();
  print(attr(last.dump,"error.message"));
  traceback();
  sink();
  q()}))

The function findLineNum() could be used if you have the name of the file somewhere available. If you have the error message, you could do something like :

dump.frames()
x <- attr(last.dump,"error.message")
ll <- gsub("Error in (.*) : .*","\\1",x)
lln <- findLineNum(srcfile,ll)

edited Sep 07 '10 at 17:10

answered Sep 07 '10 at 16:57

Joris Meys

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+1 Thanks, that's kind'a disappointing that it's not yet implemented by default in R. Seems to me like a very desirable feature. – David B Sep 08 '10 at 06:51
This doesn't help if the error is at the top level of an R script. – jamie.f.olson Jan 02 '15 at 17:58

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 14 '11 at 03:56

In the upcoming R 2.14, the core team is making progress toward implementing this feature. Functions in scripts loaded with source(file=..., keep.file=TRUE) will contain an attribute srcref, which identifies the range of characters corresponding to the function's definition in an in-memory copy of the source file stored as an object of class srcfilecopy.

This does not immediately provide line-level debugging, but it lets you get approximate line numbers if you're willing to get your hands dirty. Also, it's progress.

R script line numbers at error?

2 Answers2

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